Self-Anointment with Lemons by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers

Weeks-Rogers moves between the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the light and the dark. Self-Anointment with Lemons is concerned with the spaces between individuals, both the literal and the metaphorical, but also the spaces individuals explore within themselves. The ritual of coming back to oneself, time and again, to interrogate these spaces comprises the bulk of her concern: we very often turn ourselves inside-out on the road to self-examination. Why not, instead, anoint the self, and pay homage to the process? This collection convinces the reader that such a thing is possible.

–Jay Szczepanski, poetry instructor at Flagler College

Self-Anointment with Lemons is an eternal wound in search of healing. A pneuma in mourning and translation. A flor de muerte dressed in “incredible orange.” A “spell against what words bloom from decayed ground.” A palimpsest of unexpected crossings. An incantation of “silent homage” and “Cardinal feather” inside our beloved throats. An elegy of voices submerged with reassembled bone. Weeks-Rogers writes: “There is no white spell to recover language.” But in these pages, our broken hearts mend amidst the backdrop of sun and earth and song. Each segment of yellow and pith against the acidic rind renders the body as open discourse. This book is a ritual inside the liminal space between grief and tenderness. A light made sacred.

–Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham University Press)

Nearly each poem in this collection enacts the tension of language: its ability to simultaneously present and obliterate. We begin with The Lost, a sign to identify friends who died, and deep keening over lost meanings. Hollow signs interlock with the silent dead. Language “can’t put sensations into words / when years of life-force arranged from back / to front now furl front to back again.” Yet while language falls short, the poems’ expression of language’s failure manages to describe, as in to mark out, with polyphony and vivid color, The Lost’s presence in everyday life. As Weeks-Rogers writes so beautifully “There’s nothing empty in all that penetrating velvet / blue-black, when you gaze long enough.”

–J’Lyn Chapman, author of To Limn / Lying In

Kristiane-Weeks Rogers’ Self-Anointment with Lemons feels like a scrolling index as narrative to these fractured times, each line popping with the sensual—poems teeming with the pop and hiss of the present. If that sounds in any way formulaic the poems are anything but—ecstatic, soulful, exuberantly ongoing. What’s here is what I want from poetry, immediacy so absolute I can’t stop tasting and breathing and hearing the world—landscapes luminous with sand and blue water, Our Lady of Guadalupe tattoos and Mariachi music, Envidia and Toloache, Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, language so deep in its bilingual ache we long to burst into flame due to the thrill of mere sound. I couldn’t get through a couple poems at a time without wanting a salt-rimmed glass and a trip to a museum so I could stand once again in front of a Barnett Newman painting or to sit myself down for a Tarot reading. How can language so easily be the thing, the place? I love the electricity in these pages, the duende leaping off the page as if each poem were a recipe for immersion in the unapologetic act of living the day.

–David Dodd Lee, Author of Orphan, Indiana and Animalities.